In Castro's Cuba, can we believe a father's words?

ON MON., JAN. 6, I FOUND MYSELF IN TRAFFIC OFF OF

Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. The Heat was set to make its second home appearance at the new American Airlines Arena, and half of Miami was trying to make it to the game. I say only half of Miami because the other half of the city was stuck behind a wall of police shields.

For as long as I can remember, Miami has been a place where you have to check the traffic reports on the radio before leaving home. The Palmetto Expressway regularly becomes the largest parking lot in the state, and Interstate 95 is perennially under construction. In fact, until recently, the most volatile issue in local politics was transit. But the traffic on Biscayne Boulevard that night seemed different. A little boy's mother had died at sea weeks before in an attempt to bring him to freedom, and Miami's Cuban Exile Community was not about to let him go back to the island.

Of course, by all appearances, the people of Fidel Castro's Cuba are equally passionate about not letting their exiled countrymen and women keep little Elian Gonzalez among the "Yankee imperialists." Cries of "Save Elian" have rung loudly from both sides of the Florida Straits in recent weeks. In Miami, Elian's relatives argue that the boy should stay in the United States in accordance with his mother's wishes. In Cuba, Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, argues that he is a fit parent for his son, even though he divorced the boy's mother and has never been the boy's primary caretaker.

As we evaluate these two competing claims, we cannot make the mistake of treating this as a straightforward custody battle. In March, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Rosa Rodriguez will hear Elian's Miami relatives' arguments for custody of the boy. Ideally, the boy's father should be able to come to Miami and claim custody of his son, as would normally be his right as the child's surviving parent.

Then again, ideally, the Cuban people would not be living under the communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro. In the United States, it has become fashionable in some circles to downplay Castro's faults and to praise him for things such as his literacy campaigns. Yet we must remember when we listen to Juan Miguel Gonzalez that not only his eloquent Spanish, but perhaps also its content, may be courtesy of Castro. When Elian's Miami relatives speak, it is under the full protection of the First Amendment. When Elian's father speaks, his words could be his own, but they could also be those of an oppressive regime.

Of course, this does not in and of itself mean that Gonzalez should lose custody of his son. It only means that it may not be advisable to treat his words as an accurate representation of his wishes for his son. The U.S. cannot assume that Juan Miguel Gonzalez has been able to speak his mind from Castro's Cuba.

We are thus faced with two possibilities. The first is that Gonzalez actually wants to bring his son back to Cuba, in which case he should be allowed to do so. The second possibility is that he is being coerced into saying that he wants his son to return to Cuba. If the latter is the case, then it is our moral responsibility to keep Elian in the United States. Since the Cuban regime does not guarantee to its people the same freedoms of speech that our country does, we should require Juan Miguel Gonzalez to visit this country and to repeat his requests on free soil. Only then will we know what Elian's future should be.

Daniel Serviansky is a senior in Branford.

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